School Districts in Oregon require a sports clearance for students in grades 7 through 12 to have a physical examination once every two years to get the OK to Play. Official OK to Play partners ensure annual check-ups include necessary physical, emotional, and developmental screenings, completion of necessary sports clearance forms (per OSAA guidelines), and the opportunity to have important health discussions.
Assessing physical, emotional, and social development is important at every stage of life, but more so with adolescents. Taking the time for a primary care provider to have conversations with teens to screen for stress, anxiety, emotional well-being, and risk reduction is critical during this phase of life. Behaviors established during adolescence, such as eating habits and physical activity, often extend into adulthood.
An annual adolescent well visit with your primary care provider is the best way to ensure a teen has the proper medical screening and to ensure your child gets the OK to play in time for school sports.
This important educational program focuses on educating parents to visit their child's primary care provider for an annual check-up, which includes a sports physical, and in most cases is completely covered by insurance.
“With a toddler and two teenagers to support, 'Sue' qualified for the Oregon Health Plan and was able to take her 3 year old daughter to Central Oregon Pediatrics. While in the office, she picked up an OK to Play rack card (in Spanish). Reading the materials, Sue discovered that her son, 'Paul', was required to get a physical before football season started. Since her son was going into the 9th grade in the fall and dreamed of playing football for Mountain View High School, Sue knew she needed to schedule a Well Child exam. However, Sue was worried about the cost of the exam. She inquired about the cost and was relieved to find out that OHP would cover the cost of Paul's exam and physical. In August, Paul had his Well Child exam and physical and was able try out for the team.”
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The purpose of this program is to:- Reduce healthcare expense: Most insurance plans only allow/cover one annual prevention visit per year. If a parent makes the appointment on the child's birthday for instance as a good reminder in February, due to the school policy that the sports physical must be after May 1st, it will not be eligible. The parent will then have to pay out of pocket for another unnecessary visit to their provider to do a sports physical to meet the arbitrary school date.
- Improve medical outcomes: Currently, many families believe a sports physical is the same as a full adolescent well-child visit (AWCV). This misconception leads parents to unwittingly not seek comprehensive medical care with their primary care provider. Any provider outside a child’s primary care physician (PCP) does not have the unique and detailed patient history, medication list or care plan to understand the full medical complexity of a patient. Without this complete history, there is not the ability to ensure the patient is up to date on vaccines, immunizations or that medications such as asthma controller medications are in compliance. This causes inefficiencies and fragmented care for our youth.
- Involve less bureaucracy/hassle: Following the OSAA rules, a parent would only need to seek a sport physical and turn it into the school every two years. They would also be allowed to use their annual AWCV and included sports physical clearance form anytime and not be constrained by the school's arbitrary dates.
- Increase access to medical appointments: With the short window that schools accept sports clearance forms, parents of kids in sports must push their visits into this window of time. Across the community, there is a huge push for AWCV's before school starts which reduces access for other sick kids and stresses the healthcare system pushing out these visits sometimes for months to see a provider.
- Include Comprehensive Care: Community Sports Physical exams do not currently meet the specifications for annual AWCVs and do not count towards meeting this quality health indicator. AWCVs are comprehensive health exams provided by the adolescent’s PCP and Patient-Centered Primary Care Home. Sports Physicals performed in the community have medical information that does not get communicated back to the PCP and medical home resulting in fragmented care across the community.
- This project was implemented by The Center Foundation.
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The project attempted to:-
Educate parents to visit their child's primary care provider for an annual check-up, including a sports physical
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Educate provider clinics to ensure a Sports Physical and complete OSAA paperwork are part of a combined AWCV
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Promote AWCV's across the tri-county region to improve both quality incentive metrics and adherence to annual preventative well-health visits
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Remove the time constraint that currently exists within certain schools and adhere to the OSAA's recommendation of a sports physical every 2 years
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Our education materials were created and available for distribution by 6/1/19. Materials included radio and television spots, rack cards, website launch, and visual advertisements.
Distributed over 14,000 postcards to households with children ages 13-18 in Central Oregon.
Delivered Ok to Play rack cards to Primary Care clinics in Bend, Redmond, Sisters, and Madras in June 2021 and June 2020.
Sent Ok To Play flyers to families participating in athletics via Sisters High School Athletic Director in June 2020 and August 2019.
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- Several challenges arose in the initial year. First, it was important to remove the May 1 sports clearance deadline upheld by Bend-La Pine School District. The timing of this date creates a barrier for primary care providers to complete Well Care Visits. It forces them to complete visits between May and August of the current year, rather than allowing a full 12 month cycle based on the previous visit date. Unfortunately, Bend-La Pine School District was unwilling to change this policy. In addition, Bend-La Pine also declined to promote OKtoPlay directly, due to stated issues with promoting a “brand.” Fortunately, they approved of and did agree to promote the overall messaging.
- Second, some individual schools preferred to promote free standalone sports physicals, rather than the comprehensive Well Child Visit. We will continue to work with these schools to improve messaging and encourage them to promote the OKtoPlay brand. Likewise, some rural school districts already had free sports physical events scheduled for the year, and they were reluctant to cancel those events midstream to adopt Well Child Visits including sports clearance. Initially, Madras school district declined to adopt the program in favor of their schedule free sports physical events. After continued conversation, including a meeting with our partners at Apex Physical Therapy in Madras, that school district agreed to promote OKtoPlay.
- Our greatest challenge for year-one was the closure of schools due to COVID-19. Continued uncertainty regarding the return to school and sports for this fall requires us to request an extension of the grant period and program for an additional six months. Any advertising campaigns this past summer would have been futile while COVID cases continued to climb. Now that the Oregon School Activities Association has made a decision and finalized a new activities calendar, each school is working to establish a new sports program schedule. We hope that we can resume the OKtoPlay marketing campaign this fall to coincide with the new sports calendar that will run winter through spring.
During the first year roll out of OK to Play, Wade Miller, former CEO for Central Oregon Pediatric Associates, told us that Quality Incentive Metrics data for the region shows an increase in Annual Well Child Visits that can only be attributed to the OK to Play program provided by The Center Foundation.
Surpassing the target goal of 48.9% and landing at 53.2% was attributed to the addition of the OK to Play program.
OK to Play proved to be a successful program.